Among the assets in dire need of a visual upgrade are the paintings. The painting models suffer from mesh issues, textures are very low-res, and the actual pictures are rather insipid and uninteresting. I've been planning to rework these for a while now, but before doing that I would like to invite everyone to share any pictures of paintings that you've come across, that we could use for our painting meshes. The pictures would have to be of a decent resolution, not have too werid proportions, be free to use, and should fit the Cyrodiilic atmosphere. Anything that seems to obliquely reference Imperial stuff would be a bonus.

The paintings are one of the projects I've been thinking of tackling as well- If possible, we should make them from scratch like the stained glass windows, statues, etc (rugs and tapestries are also on this list for me).

I have a couple ideas for different schools of Imperial art that I'll explore more fully in the coming days, but in short, I'd like it to be fairly minimalistic and impressionistic in terms of shapes and color, and shy away from generic Renaissance/enlightenment artwork- think Greek black figure pottery, Erte, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Rousseau. For now I'll post a few reference images that get close to what I have in mind and let y'all weigh in:

I also want to get away from prevailing renaissance/medieval style - though I was thinking more in terms of impressionism or the german romanticists. We should keep in mind the limits of the medium: things like Erte's posters or black figure pottery depend on industrial print technology and the medium of pottery for their look, and can't be transplanted to paint that easily. We do know that the Imperials have some form of printing, so ...

I think some form of poster-print objects would be an interesting addition: cheap framed paper prints of popular saints, of the Emperor, that kind of thing. These could be very expressive, art-deco like.

Fun fact: Henri Rousseau never once in his life saw a jungle. His paintings are based on plants from botanical gardens and scientific publications, mashed together photoshop-style. You could argue that this makes him even better a source for Cyrodiil, though - the idea of a jungle.

OK, so here's a fairly quick example of what I'm kind of envisioning- I recreated one of Oblivion's "screenshot with a canvas filter" paintings in the style I'd like to move forward with- with more time, more detail can be added of course, but just for the sake of getting it out there:

Hmm. Feels a bit too flat and geometrical for me. A painting without perspective doesn't equal one without depth. The feel of the brushes and the texture is very nice, though.

I'm not sure if the Grecan artstyle is one we should necessarily invoke. Perhaps something in the line of Mughal or Indian paintings?

I still feel like it would be easier to raid Classic Art Paintings or something for this. I've no doubt that you can make some amazing pictures, but there's 27 of these bastards. I'd be a huge investment of time and effort.

Interesting stuff. The subject matter is a tad too orientalist for the westerners, but the general style is very appropriate. I especially like the abstract backgrounds, like the red plane in the second one or the simplistic tree in the third one. The colors looks very fine as well.

Made some paintings, as well as additional portraits. Drawing mostly from the works of Thomas Cole & Claude Lorrain for the landscapes, with a few lore elements photoshopped in, and they're all getting pretty heavily edited so that they don't look just look like photographs pasted into a DDS file. What do you think, should I keep going in this style?

These look really good. Looks like you're already doing this, but the only thing I ask is that you don't add any "canvas" relief like all those screenshot painting packs seem to do. That drives me nuts.

As it happens, I had a bunch of pictures saved up for this exact purpose. Probably not all useful, but maybe give them a look?

Thanks guys Roerich, I'll take another look at the Ivan one - I might splice it together with another painting just to make it less immediately recognizable - we have a couple of Colovian clothing items that are directly inspired by this particular painting, so I'm loathe to give it up altogether.

These are great. Keep in mind that the last four/five paintings have pretty bad meshes in comparison to the others - I will replace these with something more in line with the others when I get the time.

Hmm. UV fixing should be easy to do in blender - just send them over and I'll have a look. Texture stretching sound like trouble, but I'm not sure what's causing it here: are you stretching the texture to fit the frame?

Thanks Sorry, I don't know where my head was - use this version, it actually includes the portrait meshes as well and a "fixed" version of the portrait_05 asset that has a less recognizable model than Ivan the Terrible.